In preparation for my older sister’s baby shower this Sunday, I’ve been envisioning possible dishes and recipes: a fruit salad of blackberries and fresh pepper, mini-lemon cakes and smoked salmon canapes, and even a fussy, flaky biscuit recipe I once made that calls for frozen, stamp-sized pieces of butter to be pressed one by one between thumb and forefinger.
Food has also been figuring into my research lately. (It's a rough life, I tell ya.) I’m preparing a paper on 19th century American mourning rituals for a conference this fall, and I've let the cultural net lazily drift to include Victorian shopping, reading, eating and just about every other ritualized 19th century activity I can think of. Everything I've read this summer about early American cooking discusses the changes mass production brought to the kitchen. The marketplace of the late 1800’s was flooded with more home goods than any cook really knew what to do with. Housewives of the previous century would have ordered select iron utensils from the local blacksmith, but a new wealth of factory-made shiny peelers, trimmers, and graters promised to simplify the Victorian woman's work and make her kitchen sassy and modern.
Some of these products came with names that just beg to be read aloud:
Heads and eyes, shakers’ swifts, beefsteak pounders, faucets and bungstarts, bootjacks and leg-resters, salt and spit-boxes, Chinese swings, Chinese punk in boxes, sillabub-sticks, oven peels, allblaze-pans, ice cream pagodas, paste jaggers and cutters. (The World of Antiques of Victorian America).
I don't know what they are either, but I want them.
My own grandmother, like her Victorian mother before her, was concerned with culinary correctness and the use of appropriate dishes and utensils. Her cabinets boasted cups for soft boiled eggs and fine china cups for our milky, sweet Earl Grey. At the end of dinner she'd open a rectangular box of Borden’s Neapolitan ice cream, overturn the brick onto a gilded platter and slice off servings for her rows of impatient grandchildren). When I was little, I saw this refinement as a natural expression of her gentle and decorous love for us. In studying Victorian culture I better see the threads that connect this way of life to one that thrived in dining rooms a century before.
Now a word about Victorian food molds. As someone who has never really seen the point of jello, I was fascinated to discover the Victorian rage for these odd metal structures. At the height of their vogue, they were regularly stuffed with jellied veggies, meats, and fruit and overturned onto serving plates (the ancestor of my grandmother's ice cream brick). Cooks embraced these food-contouring devices so zealously that a fancy dinner may well have featured all three courses— appetizer, entree, and dessert—served in molds. While Victorian etiquette manuals warned against such basely sensual displays as remarking on the tastiness of the meal, it was thought perfectly acceptable to marvel at the sculptural heights of the dessert jelly (or, for that matter, the appetizer, the salad, or the entree jellies).
Writing this, it occurs to me that by reducing many different foods to a single texture, the mold represented a very specific way of flaunting abundance. The diet of frontiersmen and early American pioneers rested on one key task— deriving as many recipes as possible from a single food: corn. Corn cakes, popped corn, corn bread, etc. The mold goes in the other direction, flaunting plenitude by homogenizing it into smooth, wobbly uniform shapes.
What would 19th century cooks have thought about this great old American recipe?
“Indian Pudding”
From The Plimouth Colony Cookbook (1964), a collection of 17th and 18th century cooking lore
Take the mornings milk and throw into it as much corn meal as you hold in the palm of your hand. Let the molasses drip in as you sing “Nearer My God to Thee,’ but sing two verses in cold weather.
I have no access to “mornings milk," but I like the idea of timing recipes by song. The closest I can recall to this is singing all the verses of “American Pie” while doing dishes with Em back in the day!
